Charles Krauthammer explains
Here Obama has spent two years bestowing upon the peasantry the “New Foundation” of a more regulated, socially engineered and therefore more humane society, and they repay him with recalcitrance and outright opposition. Here he gave them Obamacare, the stimulus, financial regulation and a shot at cap-and-trade — and the electorate remains not just unmoved but ungrateful.Faced with this truly puzzling conundrum, Dr. Obama diagnoses a heretofore undiscovered psychological derangement: anxiety-induced Obama Underappreciation Syndrome, wherein an entire population is so addled by its economic anxieties as to be neurologically incapable of appreciating the “facts and science” undergirding Obamacare and the other blessings their president has bestowed upon them from on high.
Appears Obama has been consulting with famed neurologist, Janeane Garofalo, on Republicans and their limbic brains.
Mr Krauthammer continued beyond what Mrs Click quoted:
I have a better explanation. Better because it adheres to the ultimate scientific principle, Occam’s Razor, by which the preferred explanation for any phenomenon is the one with the most economy and simplicity. And there is nothing simpler than the Gallup findings on the ideological inclinations of the American people. Conservative: 42 percent. Moderate: 35 percent. Liberal: 20 percent. No fanciful new syndromes or other elaborate fictions are required to understand that if you try to impose a liberal agenda on such a demonstrably center-right country — a country that is 80 percent non-liberal — you get a massive backlash.
The author then noted that Americans can actually see what has been happening in Europe, the near-collapses of the economies of Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, as well as the real financial struggles in the larger European economies of Germany, France and the United Kingdom. Those countries have, in effect, been employing the policies that President Obama would like to impose on the United States, and they haven’t turned out so well.
For some unfathomable reason, we center-rightists in the United States have come to the shocking realization that at some point, you have to pay your bills, that at some point you cannot have more than your actually produce.
But, I will certainly confess something: I definitely have Obama Underappreciation Syndrome! I very much underappreciate his intellect, his policies, his style and his politics!
Alas! We so frequently have too little respect for our betters…….
But you don’t understand, Dana. It’s the left half of the 20 percent that is mainstream. The 42 percent are radical, dangerous, right wing extremists. We can tell that by looking at other polling data. A poll of “all adults” will be further left than a poll of “registered voters” will be further left than a poll of “likely voters” will tend slightly left of the actual vote outcome.
(Of course, we don’t want to discuss the relationship between adults/registered voters/likely voters and political awareness; that would be heretical.)
In late 2008 I kept asking what “Hope and Change” meant. There was never an answer, just a vague new way of politics. I asked what people knew of Obama and at best I got he was a great speaker. My attitude said, so what to that, there are plenty of them around, and actors too. Then I asked what background he had. I wasn’t told much so I went and looked for myself.
Every figurative rock I oveturned had socialist written on it. The ACORN affiliation was that of “Community Organizer”, or rabble rouser. His past was dotted with CPUSA members, radicals, and just plain out of the mainstream. Then I read he sought out radical students while in college. I saw the encounter with “Joe the Plumber” on his plan of redistribution of wealth.
All I heard I surmised, Progressive, Radical, Socialist, Communist, and Liberal. A Centrist didn’t fit this mold.
I watched the Convention. I watched the coronation in Denver. I watch people enraptured with thin air and an empty suit. I saw no executive experience.
I do remember a couple coming to my door singing the praises of BO. I asked some of the above and got no satisfactory answer. My comment was he would be a disaster. And that’s where we are, a disaster. I see now a president who looks at the people as ingrates. I still see an empty suit. I have no Hope for him and his change is bankrupting the country.
Maybe the whole idea was to pull a cloward-piven on us to collapse the country from within. I see a Chavez wannabe dictator for life. I see no friend of America. I see a heathen who reads the Declaration of Independence and leaves out endowed by our creator. I see someone who in our email group I labeled the Manchurian Candidate (I’ve seen others make that connection too) I see someone sent to destroy America, and he has a head start.
Well the Phillies just lost the pennant. They had their chances in this game. The pitching held up the entire series, but the hitting did not, especially Ryan Howard, and the fielding was a bit sloppy at an important moment. In the end, the Giants proved themselves the better team.
Yorkshire says about Obama:
Yorkshire, I can understand your concern for our country’s well being, but I see no evidence whatsoever that Obama is purposely trying to “destroy America”.
It is true that the recovery has been sluggard and has not met expectations, but you discount the depth of the hole into which we have fallen.
Your attitude sounds exactly like the Rush Limbaugh daily rant, which I understand well because I sample Rush on a daily basis. The man can be mesmerizing. However, it is people like him who have done all they can to undermine the Obama Presidency, and he has been effective, no doubt about it. I’ve never seen anything like it. And I know you listen to Rush, because I have seen you come forward with exactly the same ideas, this being the latest and most complete. Of course you can believe whatever you want, evidence or not, but you might want to think a little deeper about Rush’s overwhelming anarchical negativism. Rush Limbaugh is no American patriot in my view, Obama is. Now that is not to say that Obama has not made some bad mistakes, because he has, in my view.
I think one problem we have is not adjusting fast enough to the global competitive environment, so we continue to lose ground. No problem for the wealthy, because they have found ways to grow their wealth, while the middle and the poor have lost ground due to stagnant wages and job losses. Also, the wealthy have been able to use their money power to control government policy in their favor. Even Obama, although he has been effective, has not been effective enough. It is going to take much more time, and the backing of the American people, not just for Obama, who is a transitory figure, in power for at most eight years, but for the constructive forces that find ways to work on behalf of all the people, not just the wealthy.
It has taken us 30 years to get to decline to where we are, therefore it will probably take a long time for us to recover. This will require serious belt tightening, because another big problem we have had is that we ourselves, as individuals, have been living way beyond our means. Moreover, we must tackle the energy supply situation, to develop alternative energy sources. There are so many challenges; the way our politics are moving, I don’t see us as being ready to step up to our challenges. Instead, we currently would rather be in denial of the reality of these challenges. This is not good and has to change!
Perry, Election Projection is showing a pick-up of 58 seats and climbing in this election cycle, so we are indeed correcting the egregious errors of the last two election cycles. This country may have hope yet.
And, yes, Obama sought out the most radical of professors. He is also on track with Cloward-Piven, and regularly flouting the Constitution. I believe Obama is intentionally destroying 400 years of American history.
Krauthammer is a liar. Here is one example..
http://parallaxbrief.wordpress.com/2009/03/12/charles-krauthammer-lying-eu-obamasocialism/
Perry wrote:
Sorry about the Phillies, though I’m sure that Rovin is happy with the result. The Texas Rangers have never won a World Series, so it won’t disappoint me if they win it all.
But, given your last sentence, if the Republicans capture the House of Representatives on Election Day, will you admit that, “In the end, the Republicans proved themselves the better team?”
Perry wrote:
The problem isn’t the “depth of the hole into which we have fallen,” but that our President is using a shovel to try to dig us out, and the hole’s only getting deeper. Or, to use another analogy the President likes, if the car has been driven into a ditch, rather than trying to back out, he’s trying to give it more gas in an attempt to blast through to the other side. The front tires had been stuck; now the President has lurched further, and buried the grille.
Perry also wrote:
Well, Perry, you ought to be a Republican. It is te Republicans who are proposing a “serious belt tightening,” while the President and party you are supporting think that the way out is to borrow even more money, to try to live even further beyond our means!
You want to develop alternative energy sources? Great! But the people who are best positioned to do that are, unsurprisingly enough, the current energy companies! They have the engineering expertise, and they have the financial resources, to do the work, while other people really don’t. Yet were your ideas put into place, you would restrict their profits and try to take away from the corporations which have the best chance of developing alternative energy sources the resources to do so.
The problem, I think, is that when you see challenges, you see the government as the solution to them. But the government really isn’t the mechanism to get things done; even when it came to the Apollo Project, the work was all done by private corporations, the ones who had the expertise and the engineers to do the work. At most, the government provided some direction, and paid the bills.
American private industry has provided virtually every advance our country has ever seen, and it has all been done to seek a profit.
Dana wrote:
I basically agree with you, but you have left some important stuff out.
Corruption has set in to American Corporations. Firstly, they have lost a sense of pay for performance, such that those in the executive ranks get grossly overpaid and the lower ranks underpaid. Secondly, Corporations have overstepped their bounds with regard to control of the governement through shadow campaign contributions and the like, assisted by the recent activist decision by the SCOTUS overturning a century of precedence, the Citizens United case.
Government does have a role, and that is oversight, the collapse of which has contributed to our current economic demise. Thus, you have chosen not to mention the corrupt Wall Street overreach which has so negatively impacted our country.
So Dana, you seem to have some sort of an idealized view of Corporate America which conveniently disregards their corrupt overreach and neglect, thus the need for government!
PS: In speaking of the accomplishment of American Corporations, you have left out the fact that the government has been the initiator and funding agent for much of the basic research and start up incentives that have enabled the Corporate successes that you are touting!
Perry wrote:
assisted by the recent
activistconservative decision by the SCOTUSoverturning a century of precedencereturning the law to constitutional bounds, the Citizens United case.Fixed that for you!
Perry wrote:
If that is the case, it is the proper province of the shareholders to address the issue, not the government.
You seem to have ignored another section of the First Amendment here, the part which recognizes “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Corporations are, very specifically, an assembly of people who have come together to achieve a particular thing, and in making campaign contributions or lobbying for particular things, they are petitioning the Government.
Perry says:
24 October 2010 at 00:29
Well the Phillies just lost the pennant. They had their chances in this game. The pitching held up the entire series, but the hitting did not, especially Ryan Howard, and the fielding was a bit sloppy at an important moment. In the end, the Giants proved themselves the better team.
You can’t stand there with the bat on your shoulder in the bottom of the 9th, score 3-2, runner in scoring position, 2 outs, count 3 & 2 and watch a called 3rd strike. You gotta protect the plate, and Howard watched it sail by his knees. If he swung and missed, that’s one thing, but be a spectator? No, no, no.
But in between we watched the beginning of SNL, a winner [added]
Blubonnet says:
24 October 2010 at 02:54
Krauthammer is a liar. Here is one example..
http://parallaxbrief.wordpress.com/2009/03/12/charles-krauthammer-lying-eu-obamasocialism/
Where’s the lie? I think Krauthammer named it nicely.
Krauthammer is, as usual, brilliant. He takes BS and refutes it with both science and common sense.
Haha, Dana! Hilarious, and dead on point!
[retrieved from moderation - pH]
Krauthammer is, as usual, brilliant. He takes BS and refutes it with both science and common sense.
You obviously missed the bit where he was spanked for lying, with proof that the US was more socially stagnant than Europe.
Given how often you get spanked in this forum, I thought you’d be a bit more attentive to that by now…
Thanks, Phoe.
Who here can match or exceed Krauthammer’s CV?
Life and career
Krauthammer was born on March 13, 1950 in New York City.[3][4] He was raised in Montreal, Quebec, where he attended Herzliah High School and McGill University and obtained an honors degree in political science and economics in 1970. From 1970 to 1971, he was a Commonwealth Scholar in politics at Balliol College, Oxford. He later moved to the United States, where he attended Harvard Medical School. Suffering a paralyzing diving accident in his first year of medical school,[5] he was hospitalized for a year, during which time he continued his medical studies.[6] He graduated with his class, earning an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1975, and then began working as a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital. In October 1984, he became board certified in psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.[7]
From 1975–1978, Krauthammer was a Resident and then a Chief Resident in Psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital. During this time he and a colleague identified a form of mania resulting from a concomitant medical illness, rather than a primary inherent disorder, which they named “secondary mania”[8] and published a second important paper on the epidemiology of manic illness.[9] The standard[citation needed] textbook for bipolar disease (Manic Depressive Illness by Goodwin and Jamison)[10] contains twelve references to his work.
In 1978, Krauthammer quit medical practice to direct planning in psychiatric research for the Jimmy Carter administration, and began contributing to The New Republic magazine. During the presidential campaign of 1980, Krauthammer served as a speech writer to Vice President Walter Mondale.
In January 1981, Krauthammer began his journalistic career, joining The New Republic as a writer and editor. His New Republic writings won the 1984 “National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism.” In 1983, he began writing essays for Time magazine. In 1985, he began a weekly column for the Washington Post for which he won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
In 2006, the Financial Times named Krauthammer the most influential commentator in America,[11] saying “Krauthammer has influenced US foreign policy for more than two decades. He coined and developed ‘The Reagan Doctrine’ in 1985 and he defined the US role as sole superpower in his essay, ‘The Unipolar Moment’, published shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Krauthammer’s 2004 speech ‘Democratic Realism’, which was delivered to the American Enterprise Institute when Krauthammer won the Irving Kristol Award, set out a framework for tackling the post 9/11 world, focusing on the promotion of democracy in the Middle East.”
In 2009, Politico columnist Ben Smith wrote that Krauthammer had “emerged in the Age of Obama as a central conservative voice, the kind of leader of the opposition that economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman represented for the left during the Bush years: a coherent, sophisticated and implacable critic of the new president. “ New York Times columnist David Brooks says that today “he’s the most important conservative columnist.”[12]
Apart from the Pulitzer Prize and the National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism, Krauthammer has received numerous other awards, including the People for the American Way’s First Amendment Award, the Champion/Tuck Award for Economic Understanding, the first annual ($250,000) Bradley Prize, and the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism,[13] an annual award given by the Eric Breindel Foundation.
Who here can match or exceed Krauthammer’s CV?
What does that have to do with the fact that he was just spanked for lying?
Oh, and I’ll point out that Noam Chomsky has one of the most impressive CVs on the planet. He’s literally one of teh top ten most cited academics in history.
i think pho could get a accurate diagnosis from krauthammer.